Effect of muscle-skeletal system pain observed in dentists to the quality of life and physical activity

Chronic pain problem is frequently observed due to erratic use of muscle-skeletal system in some professions. One of those professions is dentistry. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of muscle-skeletal system based pain occurring due to working conditions and the profession on the quality of life and physical activity. One-hundred dentists having 2-15 years of experience in their profession without any congenital muscle-skeletal system deformity and neurologic, orthopedic, reumatismal problems were included in the study. Dentists included in our study were interrogated socio-demographically, pain evaluation was performed using VAS. International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was used in evaluation of physical activity level and SF-36 in quality of life. It was detected that 76% of participants had at least pain in one region of muscle-skeletal system. Muscle-skeletal pain was observed mostly in the back, belly and neck regions with 23%, 20% and 17% frequency, respectively. It was observed in our study that muscle-skeletal system pains were more frequent in women, and there was no difference in pain severity and duration between working while on-foot or sitting. It was detected that 48% of the participants were inactive, 45% minimally active and 7% active according to IPAQ. It was observed that there was no significant relationship between pain existence and physical activity level (p>0.05). Statistically significant differences were found in physical function, pain, general health, vitality, social functionality, physical function summary score and mental health summary score and pain existence among SF-36 parameters among participants (p<0.05). According to the results obtained in our study, it was observed that muscle-skeletal system pains negatively effected the quality of life but had no effect on physical activity.